Printing a 1920's Drive-In Market

I've been doing less work on the layout for a bunch of reasons, but one of the larger offenders is a new tool, a Makerbot 3d printer. This squirts out threads of styrene plastic to build up three-dimensional objects.

I've been bitching lots about the lack of Spanish Revival-style buildings in HO, and fabricating the curves of these models is a pain to do by hand. I've also been eager to build a 1920's drive-in market, and Spanish style was insanely popular during the '20's and '30's, so this seemed like a great project to try. My best luck in the past with such buildings was the Campbell storefront. In that case, I used a metal milling machine to cut a Plexiglas sheet for the facade - not the easiest of jobs, and a lot of trouble to remake.

This model (still, obviously, in the process of being built) is a combination of sheet styrene and printed parts. The main facade is made of four identical arches, spliced together. The storefront doors and windows are separate printed pieces. The back walls were made with sheet styrene, and I'm using door castings from my scrapbox for the back doors for the stores. The central tower is an interesting mix; I knew printing such a large object would be slow, so I made the body of the tower out of 1/16" sheet styrene, but printed the top decorative piece. Note how I had to make a tab that glues to the back of the styrene to get a good joint; edge-gluing printed pieces doesn't work well, probably because the pieces are hollow and somewhat rough.

What I've learned about 3d printing from this project:

* The Makerbot's great for making duplicate parts. It's perfect for the main building arches, and it was really easy to borrow the middle section of each facade for the tower's false front. I mentioned on my printing blog about the trouble I had keeping the arches from warping; the smaller pieces for the tower were much faster to print and less likely to warp.

Like the Cricut cutter, the 3d printer is a bit less interesting if you're only making one object, for it might be easier just to make the piece by hand. But see my note about making roofs before assuming a 3d printer only helps when making lots of identical pieces.

* The Makerbot's reasonably good at doing curved edges, but it's not great at doing finished surfaces. The extruded plastic is 0.13mm diameter (or about 1" HO), and the gaps between the extruded noodles makes the surface stripey. With the building facades, I covered the face with spackle, gesso, or acrylic medium to try to smooth out the edges.

The storefront door and windows shows what things look like without filling. These are printed pieces straight from the printer, and were only spray-painted. I wasn't sure if these would be acceptable, so I printed them out quickly to see how they'd look. They turned out better than I hope, but they're still pretty coarse, and not quite good enough for a model. These were all printed with a 45 degree angle fill; I'm hoping to print some storefronts with a vertical or horizontal fill pattern in hopes that'll look more like clapboard or another typical material.

* My big discovery today is how great the 3d printer can be for parts that are difficult to fabricate. For the tower, I wanted to have a low, tar-and-gravel roof behind the false fronts. I knew that doing a pyramid hipped roof (where all four sections of the roof meet at a single point) can be a pain to build. I've done them by building up forms for the roof line and carefully cutting and fitting each roof piece, but it's tedious work.

Instead, I just went to Sketchup, drew out a 14 foot square base, found the center of the base, drew a vertical line 3 feet high, then drew lines out to each corner. I then printed the object, and got my perfectly-sized pyramid. I'll glue some simulation of tarpaper on top, and no one will ever know how easy it was to build the roof.

More photos as I finish assembling and painting the model...

Semaphore Signals

As much as I like complex kits, I'm a big fan of models I can build while watching TV. Most of my Red Caboose refrigerator cars got built in front of the TV on cold winter nights in New York. Sometimes, it's just really nice when all I need to do is build, and not worry about anything time consuming - painting, waiting for glue to dry, etc.

These American Limited semaphore are shipped in kit form, with all the painting--including the signal blades--already done. All I had to do was glue the models together with plastic cement and superglue, and after about two nights of work, I had this line of signals ready for my Market Street shelf layout. They were quick, easy, and very satisfying. The kits are particularly neat because they're customizable; you can either choose to have one or two semaphore blades (or, if you want to break rules like me, you can even add a third semaphore blade to your signal.) You can choose one or two equipment cabinets at the base of the signal. (Normally, the two cabinets would be used for the upper and lower blade mechanism. I made a couple of my single blade signals with two cabinets just to keep the signals at similar heights for visibility and attractiveness.) You can even choose what sort of blades to use - the red home blades, the white blades, or yellow pointed blades for distant signals. I was happy I could customize the signals to match my particular scene. They also average around $7 a signal / $42 for 6, so although they're not operable, they're much cheaper than the movable semaphores on the big layout.

Helpful hints: colored markers (red and green sharpies, and a yellow/mustard art marker) do a great job on coloring the lenses for the semaphores, just as black sharpies are great for coloring handholds on the Red Caboose refrigerator cars. All the blades will eventually be painted red, but the kit didn't come with enough red-painted blades for my particular setting.

These signals are going at the east end of the San Jose Market Street station. This area was controlled by the 4th Street Tower, which controlled the east entrance to the station, switches directing trains to the north (via the line to Fremont and Niles), and south (down the middle of 4th Street and eventually to Los Angeles), and industry spurs for the Borcher Brothers Building Supply and Richmond Chase (later Hunts) Cannery. There's a great photo of this area in John Signor's Coast Line book circa 1906, taken from First Street looking East down the tracks. Old timetables even have the whistle sequence arriving trains were supposed to blow to get the towerman to set the switches. A switch engine blowing two short whistles, a long whistle, and a short whistle could get the towerman to set the switches for the Hunts Cannery.

The signals controlling the southernmost station tracks are single blade semaphores with red blades. Red blades indicate home signals and control the immediately following track, so each signal indicates whether a train is allowed to exit the station and proceed on the track towards LA. The northernmost station track has two red blades, one for each route (LA or Niles/Oakland.) The signal on the LA line has three red blades to indicate which route the engineer will take - which of the three tracks into Market Street station.

...and some specific kit ideas...

Just in passing, here's three buildings that would all make great models. I'll get around to 'em some day.

• First, Hotel Torino / Henry's Hi-Life: Pictures from the Library of Congress's Historic American Buildings Survey
  (full data).
  
• Alameda French Bakery, San Jose
  
• 
  Woelffel Cannery, Monte Vista (Cupertino) (full data).
  

I'm a big fan of the Library of Congress's Historic American Buildings Survey / Historical American Engineering Record, and think are a great resource. What's the most interesting California-appropriate building you can find there?

Top-five, all-time favorite Model Railroader issues? Well, there's December 1979...

I'm thinking in terms of top-five lists today. Something about reading High Fidelity does that to me. Either that, or it was the fever from the flu. One or the other.

Top five favorite model railroads I've seen in my life:

5) JoJo Hansen's Lake Tahoe Railway and Navigation Company. I saw it as a teenager on one of the 1981 NMRA National convention in San Mateo. He had the first double-deck layout I'd ever seen, and it all fit in the garage of a row house in Daly City. He reminded me I didn't need to wait for the perfect space before I could build a great model railroad.

4) Gene Martin's Lodi layout in Los Gatos. Wow - an entire layout modeling a single town, with huge amounts of switching! I want to do that some day. (Check out Jim Lancaster's Historic Packing Houses website for several pages carefully documenting
Lodi's industries. I'd love to see it again, and be even happier to switch some industries on that layout.

3) The narrow gauge layout at the East Bay Model Railroad Society. I remember visiting there as a kid, and stared at it for hours wondering where the train would appear out of the maze of tunnels.

2) Ed Merrin's Northwestern Pacific Railroad. I saw this at the National convention in 2001. His double-deck layout was torn up after a move, but I loved the size of the layout, and how he had lots of switching and lots of scenery in a modest space.

1) Jack Burgess's Yosemite Valley. No question, it's magic. It convinced me that modeling a real prototype in detail was the way to go, and Jack's modeling inspires me to do better on everything I build.

That took me a fair amount of thought; I guess I don't normally think in top of my "top five" or "top ten", unlike the character in the book (or John Cusack in the movie.)

But my favorite model railroads is not what got me thinking about lists. As part of my usual California-centric structure bias, I was thinking about model railroad buildings that I wish someone would produce in kits. And in the most recent Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette, my number 1 kit appeared.

So what's my top five California-theme model railroad structures I wish someone would produce as kits? It's a hard list to put together, but here's my guess:

5) Large wooden warehouses or sheds with clerestory windows at the peak (like Walther's Mountain Lumber Company). It seems like most large shed-style warehouses from the 20's have windows at the roof level to let more light into the building, and I have at least two sheds like that I need for my layout. I could buy the Walther's kits, but they're pricey and I'd hate to throw away all the other bits of the kits just so I could keep the central building. Looks like I'll be scratchbuilding these.


4) Stucco storefront building with bay windows. I've built my own for downtown Campbell, but I wish some of the folks doing brick main street structures would do a couple buildings with bay windows. There's no way to reproduce your typical California main street without 'em.

3) More Southern Pacific specific buildings. There have been some great SP-style speeder sheds and section houses produced lately, but I'm waiting for kits of an SP-style interlocking tower.

2) Airplane bungalows. It seems like half of the houses in older parts of Oakland or San Jose are airplane bungalows. These are small wooden houses that have some details from craftsman houses, but tend to have very low roof pitches hipped towards the front. I could imagine scratchbuilding one or two, but I'd love to be able to build a whole row of them.

Wait, no let me change #5. I don't want sheds, I want sawtooth roofs. I can make shed roofs all I want, but making something with a sawtooth roof is much more painful. Let's move "sawtooth roofed warehouses" to #3.

And maybe replace the stucco storefront with more spanish style buildings. Maybe. I'll need to think about that one.

And what's my #1, most wanted structure? A 1930's public market-style strip mall. Years ago, I was at Moe's Books in Berkeley and found an architecture book on strip malls and supermarkets. (The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941 by Richard Longstreth, MIT Press.) My friend thought I was nuts to pay $30 for a used book on strip malls, but it's been a great resource for me both for 1920's pictures and for inspiration for commercial businesses.

It turns out the first strip malls were outgrowths of filling stations: the service station added storefronts around the court, and the bays got filled with with a set of businesses just like the large public markets downtown. There was always a butcher, a grocery store, a vegetable seller, and a sundries store, each a separate business. By the end of the 1920's, developers even had a formula for building these: choose a busy street between the residential neighborhoods and the city center, make sure to be on a corner for visibility, but on a light street so it was easy for customers to drive in. Check out this one still standing alone San Fernando Road in Glendale.

I've always thought one of those strip malls would make a nice model building, and I was really pleased to see Rail Scale Miniatures is building one: their Horwood Brothers Service Station. It's not quite right; they've modeled a more cluttered scene to make it look busier, and they've intended it as a service station only, but all he key aspects are there: small stucco buildings, the corner lot, multiple storefronts, and some really nice mission-style details. Now if only I had a place for it on my layout.

Vasona Junction train register booth

Work's getting in the way of model building, so I'm just throwing out a picture of a project from last year: the Vasona Junction train register booth.

When running trains by telegraph messages, it was pretty common for a train to get the message "Don't pass this place unless train X has already passed there." That's easy if you're on the same track, for you'll see that train go by. What happens if the tracks branch so you wouldn't see it go past?

To answer such questions, railroads kept train register books at stations where trains started and stopped, and at all junctions. Trains passing these places would see a mark on their timetable indicating a train register book, so the train would stop and the conductor would mark down his train, the time he was passing, and his direction. He could also check the register to make sure any trains that had priority over his on the next stretch of track had already gone by.

Usually these train registers were in real stations, but Vasona Junction was stuck out in the middle of the prune orchards, and got so little traffic that the railroad didn't even bother to build a station here. Instead, they built a small booth that sat next to the tracks and contained the train register.

If you look at old timetables, you'll see that all the passenger trains stopped at Vasona Junction. They didn't do this because it was a popular location; I suspect they scheduled a stop only because they knew the trains would be stopping to sign the train register book.

My model will eventually be placed at Vasona Junction on my layout. I also keep a piece of paper handy as the "train register" and encourage the train crews to sign it as they go by.

It was a quick evening project to build. I try to keep a few of these small projects in mind when I'm stuck on what to do next. The body is styrene board-and-batten siding, with a wooden door and boarded up window. I suspect I didn't bother to cut out the door or window opening. The shingles are Campbell paper shingles. The entire booth is painted in the traditional yellow and green that SP painted most of the buildings that the public might see.

See this picture from "Railroads of Los Gatos" for a picture of the actual shack when it was standing along Winchester Blvd. just south of the Highway 85 bridge. Looking at those photos, I just realized I messed up the model; I only added one boarded up window when such windows existed on all three sides. Guess it's time to make another one!

[The Erie Lackawanna train register image came from another web site which I can't remember. I borrowed it when I gave a talk to some computer science friends on train order operation. Thanks to whoever I filched it from.]

Oooh, BIG laser cut kit!

Check out my latest kit - a Makerbot 3D printer. I'm not sure how useful it'll be for model-making; although it can make things by building up layers of plastic one HO inch high, the output's still a bit rough. Still, it ought to be interesting.

The pieces are great - 1/4" plywood eighteen inches across, and cut just as neatly as any of the laser-cut building or car kits I've made.

More later.

How Much Difference Could a Few Years Make? Part 2

For the model railroaders who try to model a specific real moment and place (and there's more of us every year), we focus on "the real world" for a bunch of reasons. Maybe we end up with a model railroad that just seems more realistic. Maybe we enjoy the historical research to find out what buildings existed at a specific point in time. Maybe it gives us more details and facts for "dressing" the scene.

One problem, of course, is that we probably can't find an exact moment. Jack Burgess models the Yosemite Valley Railroad in August 1939, but even his huge collections of photos and documents can't tell him every detail about downtown Hopeton, California in that year. Without the right documents (or all the time in the world to search for every bit of historical data), we need to search, interpret, and extrapolate to figure out what should have been at that location at that point in time.

One problem is that the world changes all too quickly. I'm sitting here in modern California, and there's times where even I complain about all the changes that have taken place in our neighborhood in the last five years, let alone twenty. Earlier this year, I wrote about how ten years of railroad timetables showed how drastically the railroad's technology, work practices, and freight traffic must have varied in that time. At the same time, the villages changed to town, motor cars went from curiosities to bumper-to-bumper traffic, music changed, fashion changed… everything changed. It's fine for us to try to interpret how the world changed from a small number of photos, but we need to remember that a few years, let alone ten, is a huge time - a fraction of someone's life - and that the world we see in pictures from 1926 may be completely gone by 1936.

For example, here's one of the photos that inspired me to build my Market Street Station shelf layout. This shows Western Granite and Marble's shed at 396 North First Street in San Jose. A similar photo in Signor's "Southern Pacific's Coast Line" book got me interested in this stretch of track just east of the old San Jose railroad station. The shed later became Borchers Brothers' Building Supply, a San Jose institution which lasted into the 1990's.

When I needed to fill in that spot in the layout, I used the Western Granite and Marble photo as my guide, and added an interesting industry to my 1930's layout. For some reason, I thought that a shed like that needed a little office, so I put a small clapboard building inside for the office structure, and put some stairs up to a storage area on the roof.

That'll make things look like the 1930's, right? Nope.

I did some later research, and found out that shed probably disappeared around 1910, replaced with a more elaborate storefront, and then, in the 1920's got replaced again with a Mission-style store and office in the trendy style of the time.


Dave Caldwell, grandson of the founders, dropped me a note about six months ago, and was kind enough to give me some more photos showing all the changes in the building. He also kindly noted that the little office inside the shed was not in the original. Here's what the building looked like in 1910:


Here's the new building under construction around 1926.


And here's the new building completed. Note that the original shed still appears to extend behind the new storefront.

And finally the late 1930's or maybe even the 1940's. Someone who knows cars can probably tell me the exact date.

So in what seems like a small time -- what's twenty years, after all? -- that building I wanted to model went from a very utilitarian shed to an elaborate and curvy false front, and then to a Mission style front. Who knows how it differed in the 1940's and 1950's, though at least I know (because the building's facade still exists) that the building stayed mostly the same in the intervening years. Dave mentioned that Borchers Brothers sold the building (and a separate yard between 2nd and 3rd streets on the south side of the railroad tracks) in 1982, and moved their yard to Sunol St. near Del Monte Plant #3. It's now a false front for a condo development on the old property, but at least that cool Spanish Revival / Mission storefront is still there.

Am I very frustrated that I built the wrong building? Not completely. The shed fits the scene well, and on a recent visit to San Francisco, we walked by one of the old piers near the Ferry Building. The main door was open, and when we looked into the cavernous space, we saw a little raised office built on poles inside the main building - kind of like my model. I might not have captured Borchers Brothers correctly, but I did record a very California-like scene.